SEASON PREMIERE This Aaron Sorkin show returns for one final mini-season, and showcases star Jeff Daniels, as anchor Will McAvoy, the same week he returns to the big screen in the long-dormant sequel to Dumb and Dumber.

Last week, I wrote that Homeland has rebounded strongly this season. Then I saw the show televised that night, and wow. That wasn’t a rebound. That was a slam dunk, and the sudden surprise it served up was one of those plot-changing stunners that typified this show’s first, best season. Welcome back, Homeland.

This day in 1985 marked the eleventh season premiere of NBC's Saturday Night Live, with host Madonna and musical guest Simple Minds. But the episode's true significance was that it marked the return of the show's creator and founding producer, Lorne Michaels...

Every time this 1967 WWII movie is televised, I like to point to a different performance and character, and it’s a trick that doesn’t seem to get tired. I could do it a dozen times, easy. And tonight, let’s look beyond the likes of Lee Marvin and Jim Brown, and pay special attention to Donald Sutherland. He has a minor role here – but three years later, in the delightful 1970 WWII movie Kelly’s Heroes, he, like Telly Savalas, managed to star in a comic variation on

Very smart timing here. Just as the 2014 live-action movie Maleficent hits video on demand, ABC family is repeating the 1959 animated Disney film, in which poor Sleeping Beauty runs afoul of a witch named Maleficent, who curses her with a prediction of death by spinning wheel needle. And thus, her father the King, like fathers everywhere, tries to shelter her in a paternal, but ultimately futile, effort to keep her away from all unwanted pricks.

SEASON FINALE: Part 2 of 2. “Dark Water” concludes tonight, and after last week’s installment, already promises to be one of the season’s best. I still haven’t fully shaken the Doctor’s visit to the supposed “afterlife,” specifically one character’s assertion (which, thank goodness, was revealed to be misleadingly false) that souls in the afterlife could feel whatever happened to the bodies they left behind, including cremation. But almost as

Tonight’s vintage episode of Saturday Night Live is from 1979, the final season featuring most of the original cast members. In 1972, Rick Nelson wrote and sang “Garden Party,” a hit about how weary he was of being asked to sing only his old songs. Seven years later, the former heartthrob star of Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet showed up on Saturday Night Live – not as musical guest (that was Judy Collins), but as guest host. Yet even as guest host, he finds time to sing

The momentum continues for this British import, which keeps packing its guest list, and its couch. The relatively unknown British name among the group is comic Micky Flanagan – but the rest of the gang this week includes Matthew McConaughey, Lena Dunham, Anne Hathaway, and the camera-shy singer Sia.

This series, having just returned for a new season, now moves to its new time slot, at 8 p.m. ET Fridays. That’s a victory of sorts for fans of quality TV, because it means that Fox finally has bitten the bullet and cancelled Utopia, one of the worst network TV series in years. Originally, Fox had scheduled its horrid reality-TV “social experiment” to run for a full year, occupying prime-time TV slots twice a week. Then Fox reduced its losses by presenting Utopia on Fridays onl